NEEDBASED featured in Fine Homebuilding Magazine

Three of NEEDBASED’s passive house projects are highlighted in an 8 page article in the May 2017 edition of Fine Home Building Magazine. In the article we discuss how we implement passive house and the regional influences of our projects.

The article also includes some fantastic sections of Olsen House, Taos House, and Balance Project. We could not be happier with how the article came out so consider grabbing a copy or you can get access to the article through their website.

“Northern New Mexico has one of the oldest design traditions in the United States. A mix of cultures intersecting for the past 500 years has led to distinctive architecture that speaks as much to the arid Southwest region as it does the people who live there. The oldest building still inhabited in the United States is the Taos Pueblo (taospueblo.com), built with a stepped, boxy form and massive adobe-brick walls. When the Spanish entered the region, they brought the hacienda with its long front portals, tall windows, and intricate woodwork. The railroad brought manufactured materials like corrugated steel and standardized lumber and trim, leading to the Territorial style. Many new buildings in the region are a mash-up of these influences.

It is in this rich backdrop that NEEDBASED Inc.—a design firm where I work under my colleague, architect Jonah Stanford—built three certified Passive Houses —the Balance House, the Taos House, and the Olsen House. For these projects, we were looking for a robust, energy-efficient system for building homes that would also be affordable. We prefer a contemporary design approach that draws on traditional qualities like the parapet roof, natural materials, and, of course, the graciously thick walls that are ubiquitous in the Southwest. We have found that we can design Passive Houses at market prices that use a fraction of the energy of a code-built home.”